Desktop Core Duo: ASUS N4L-VM and the Intel T2600

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Peeling away the layers of our Core Duo desktop: Inside the Silverstone SG-01s case is an ASUS N4L-VM Motherboard, and installed on that is a Core Duo T2600 running at 2.16GHz.

If you want to build a system soon, you’re faced with something of a dilemma: Both Intel and AMD are planning substantial upgrades to their CPUs this year. In the case of AMD, they’re simply moving the existing architecture to DDR2/667 and a new socket format. Otherwise, there are no substantial changes coming this year from AMD.

Intel, on the other hand, is readying a for their desktop PCs that’s substantially different from the existing NetBurst (Pentium D and Pentium 4) CPUs. Although it borrows a few elements from NetBurst, and adds a few twists of its own (such as single-cycle SSE instruction execution), it’s more similar to the current Intel mobile architecture than to current Pentium D processors.

Intel’s current lineup of mobile CPUs are the Core Solo and Core Duo. As you might imagine from the names, “Solo” is a single-core chip and “Duo” is dual core. So we thought we’d build up a desktop system based on the Core Duo T2600, the current top of the line.

Today, we’re going to focus on the Core Duo CPU, though we’ll take a brief look at the ASUS N4L-VM motherboard that enabled us to build this system. The whole system will become our test bed for future articles on Viiv and media-centric applications. Continued…

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